Is it understandable to deny a life -threatening escape to see the family briefly and open all the wounds again and then disappear?
Photo: Little-pes.com
“What if she doesn’t want to fly? Do you want to force them? ”Asks the ten -year -old Alborz (Sam Vafa), while he and his father grab the suitcases. He already has an idea at the beginning of the trip. Does the mother want to be picked up at all? Does she want to go to Hamburg? The larger daughter, dena (Tanaz Molaei), can reluctantly be persuaded to come along. “If it were important to her, she would come to us after all these years,” she says.
Her mother Maryam (Vishka Asayesh) has been sitting in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran for six years. Now she can leave it for seven days to be treated medically. Seven days when she will be faced with a decision: to your family in Germany or back to prison? Her brother (Sina Parvaneh) and her husband Behnam (Majid Bakhtiari) have already planned their escape. Behnam and the children want to wait for them in a small mountain village in Turkey.
Maryam doesn’t know anything about it yet. As soon as she arrives in her mother’s apartment, she picks up the phone, talks to someone about a strike. Immediately the human rights activist is in the middle of the hamster wheel of resistance, wants to serve her country, improve it. An escape was not on her plan. And yet she is not killed much later in the trunk of the car of an old school friend – the first stage on the way to her family. She reveals her tornness: “There are things that do not fit in a suitcase.” What she has in her country, what she is fighting for, cannot take her to Hamburg.
It continues in a coach where a stranger takes the escape cell phone and plugged into another device. What happens there? Is it on the right track? Maryam’s nightly escape is like a dark thriller with an uncertain outcome. It is passed from one place to the next almost without words. The scenes convey fear and tension and make the vastness of the country and the strain of the flight become felt.
Protest and rebellion not only require individual strength, but can also become a sample for families.
Finally, accompanied by a village teacher on a horse, Maryam strikes through the deep snow in the beautiful and threatening mountains between Iran and Turkey. The reunion with your family is hesitant, warm, exuberant. It is characterized by uncertainties like deep joy – and is overshadowed by Maryam’s secret decision not to go to Germany, but back to prison.
In “seven days”, director Ali Samadi Ahadi (“The Green Wave”) addresses the tornness of political activists and the difficult question: “Staying or going?” He himself fled to Germany alone in 1985 in order to escape the forced recruitment as a child’s soldier in the first Gulf War. “Seven days” celebrated premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024 and can now be seen in German cinemas. For security reasons, large parts of the film were not created as planned in Iran or in Turkey, but in Georgia. Some scenes were shot in Iran.
The script comes from Mohammad Rasoulof, the director of “The Sowing of Holy Feigenbaum”, who went to the Oscar race for the best foreign film in early 2025 and told about the family life of a investigative judge in Tehran. How “seven days” he urgently shows how political conflicts in an authoritarian regime have a private affair – more precisely: the closest family. Protest and rebellion not only require individual strength, but can also become a sample for families. Both films sensitively show how this affects the soul life of young people who have torn between solidarity for their parents and their own needs.
Rasoulof had secretly turned “the sowing of the Holy fig tree” in Iran and was just ready when he was sentenced to a prison sentence and decided in early 2024 to flee from his home country. However, the idea for “seven days” is older – and from his own thinking about how responsibility for the family and your own country can be reconciled.
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The result is a film that makes it clear how much self -abandonment is sometimes in political activism – and like children in particular suffer. Of course, the question also arises as to what would be different if Maryam were a man. Would the pressure and expectations of fulfilling your parents’ role?
The film is convincing – whether Majid Bakhtiari as a sad, understanding, understanding husband Behnam or Tanaz Molaei as an angry, vulnerable daughter. Vishka Asayesh gives a rough, determined Maryam, which her family and the viewers sometimes puzzle. Is it understandable to deny a life -threatening escape to see the family briefly and open all the wounds again and then disappear? Ultimately, there are questions that make the film interesting and show that decisions in extreme situations are not always contradictory and understandable.
In contrast, little things are irritating that spoil authenticity: how does the main actress manage to always make up for a nerve and exhausting escape? And how can your escape assistant look aside in the car and still drive straight? Despite such inconsistencies, “seven days” is an exciting film that transports the protagonist’s tornness. The decision to focus on the family and the private conflict is understandable. In order to be able to empathize with your motivation, it would certainly be helpful not only to indicate your activism. So she is presented as a political person, but not filled.
“Seven days”, Germany 2024. Director: Ali Samadi Ahadi, book: Mohammad Rasoulof. With: Vishka Asayesh, Majid Bakhtiari, Tanaz Molaei, Sam Vafa, Sina Parvaneh. 115 min. Now in the cinema.